Tip | Scoping performance issues#

Start by asking a few questions to scope the issue you are experiencing. Knowing the answer to each question will help you better understand how to approach the issue and can lead to faster resolution.

  • What is slow? Is the DSS UI loading slowly? Is a specific job taking longer than expected to complete? Are you running into any errors in addition to the performance issue, or is the issue limited to a performance issue? Is there another type of problem beyond the performance issue (e.g., your instance keeps crashing)?

  • Who is experiencing the performance issue? Is every user experiencing the same issue (e.g., the Flow is slow to load for every user), or are only some users experiencing it? (e.g., a notebook is running slowly for one user). While both may have the same level of urgency for your DSS usage, it’s important to figure out who is impacted to accurately diagnose the issue. For instance, if only one user is experiencing a problem, that particular issue may be related to a specific project or browser. If all users are experiencing the issue, it might be related to server resources.

  • When does the issue occur? Is this an intermittent issue that users sometimes experience, or does this happen every time a user performs a specific action (e.g., every time a user explores a specific dataset)? Have you noticed any other type of pattern? For instance, are you experiencing slowness when running a job at the same time each day but not if you run it at a different time?

  • Where is the execution slow? If you are experiencing slowness for a particular job, is the job running locally on the DSS server, or is it a job that’s running remotely on a Kubernetes cluster or a Spark cluster? Is it an SQL query that is executing on a remote SQL database? This information will narrow down what type of performance issue you are encountering. You may be able to explore alternatives based on where the job is executing.

Note

One of the most common categories of performance issues is when a job takes longer than expected to run. In this case, you’ll first want to identify what type of job it is.

See the troubleshoots below for advice on diagnosing specific issues.